


relational cartography

by larkgrace



Category: Lockwood & Co. - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexy April, F/M, Lockwood & Co: The Mysterious Case of the Missing Ace Ring, alternatively titled Lockwood & Co: Lockwood Get Out of the Kitchen You Burn Everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2015-04-29
Packaged: 2018-03-26 09:50:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3846424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larkgrace/pseuds/larkgrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a slow process of drawing boundaries, establishing landmarks, and naming new discoveries.</p><p>Or: Lockwood is asexual, Lucy isn't. But it's okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	relational cartography

**Author's Note:**

> SQUEAKS IN FOR THE END OF ASEXY APRIL HI GUYS
> 
> i tried not to americanize everything so much in this fic but i'm sure i still mixed up some words, sorry, american english is basically a whole other language, forgive me. also i'm like 99% sure cookies are called "biscuits" in great britan but if i wrote like that i wouldn't be able to get the image out of my head of lockwood and gang fighting over cheddar bay biscuits in red lobster.
> 
> enjoy!

Sunday afternoons at 35 Portland Row are generally dull. George will usually visit his parents for the day while Lockwood secludes himself in the basement office or in the study, leaving Lucy to peter around the house and do as she pleases. Generally, she finds the peace and quiet relaxing.

This particular Sunday afternoon, however, finds Lucy’s tea and toast interrupted by a series of _thuds_ from the second floor and Lockwood shouting, “Lucy, come up for a moment! I need your help with something!”

Lucy sighs and abandons her tea to cool on the table. She trudges up the stairs to find Lockwood sitting on his bedroom floor, tossing items out from under his bedframe—a single sock, a rapier hilt without a blade, an iron chain, a box of papers, a brilliant neon green t-shirt that she’s never seen him wear (and decides she doesn’t want to). He shakes out a bag that spills dulled pencils and old erasers onto the floor before saying, “Ah, Luce. I need your help finding something, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Lucy leans against the doorjamb and crosses her arms. “What sort of something?”

“A ring,” Lockwood says, before reaching back into the wasteland under his bed. He pulls out a notebook that he flips through quickly before discarding.

“Is it a haunted ring?” she asks, though frankly she’s not sure why _Lockwood_ of all people would keep a haunted object in his bedroom, especially after the Annie Ward fiasco. “You know my sense of Touch has a small range, Lockwood. I’d have to dig through every drawer in here.”

“No, no, it’s a regular ring. The black one I usually wear. You’ve seen it? I seem to have misplaced it.”

She had seen the ring—the plain black band that Lockwood nearly always has around the middle finger of his right hand. He’d never bothered to tell her or George what it was for; by this point she’d come to assume that it was either a family heirloom or that Lockwood just had a secret fondness for extremely plain jewelry. “Where d’you think you left it?” she asks.

Lockwood shrugs, depositing a small pile of spare change on the floor that he’s plumbed from the depths of the mattress. “I was wearing it last night, but I can’t recall whether I put it on this morning, or where I might have left it. I was hoping it had just rolled under here, but I can’t see it anywhere.”

“Fine,” Lucy says. “I’ll check the kitchen. Have you been in your office at all today? You might have left it there.”

“Not today, no,” he says, and begins to excavate under the wardrobe. “Thank you, Lucy.”

She hums in acknowledgement and starts for the stairs, when she hears a steady _drip, drip, drip_ from across the hall. Lucy lets out a sigh powerful enough to ruffle her hair, then steps into the bathroom to turn off the faucet properly. She spots the skull in its jar—thankfully covered—in the corner next to the tub, and a plain black ring sitting in the soap dish.

“I found it!” she calls, scooping up the band and marching back across the hall to Lockwood’s bedroom. She arrives just in time to see him smack his head off the bottom of the wardrobe as he crawls out.

“That was quick,” he grunts, rubbing the back of his head. Lucy drops the ring into his outstretched palm and Lockwood slides it onto his right middle finger.

“What’s the ring for? Family heirloom?” she asks.

“Oh, no, it’s just important to me,” he says. “I’ll tell you sometime. I’m afraid I’ve got to rush to DEPRAC, Barnes still wants a full debrief from Kipps and I about the Biggerstaff kerfuffle and I’ve got to make sure none of us get arrested.” He grabs his coat from where it’s hanging on his bedpost and blows out the door and down the hall.

Lucy casts a critical eye over the mess on Lockwood’s floor before making her way back to the doorway. As she does, she hears footsteps thundering on the staircase back up to the second floor, and Lockwood appears long enough to say, “Thank you, Lucy,” and press a swift kiss to her cheek.

He’s gone again in an instant, breezing down the stairs and out the front door, leaving Lucy to press her fingers to her burning cheek in a numb stupor.

*#*#*

Lucy is waiting up in the library when Lockwood returns home, half past eight, so the sun is just winking out on the horizon. George is already upstairs, ostensibly in bed but more likely reading or taking notes on the effect of piles of dirty laundry on the skull in the jar. As soon as the front door opens, Lucy rises from her chair to intercept Lockwood in the hall.

“What the _hell_ was that about?” she demands.

“What was what about?” Lockwood asks as he shrugs his coat off and hangs it on the rack. It’s too warm for such a long coat, but Lucy struggles to picture Lockwood walking down the street without it billowing ridiculously behind him.

Already she can feel a flush creeping up her neck, but Lucy stands firm. “Earlier, before you left,” she presses. “You kissed me. Why?”

Lockwood shrugs, and between that and his windswept hair and general devil-may-care demeanor, something swells up in Lucy’s chest that might be an overwhelming desire to kiss him or slap him. With Lockwood, the dividing line is thin. “I wanted to,” he says. “Should I not have? I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. Just say the word and I promise I won’t do it again.”

“Why did you want to?” she asks. Her fingertips tingle as her pulse pounds.

His smile is infuriating. “You’re very pretty when you blush,” Lockwood says. “Not that you aren’t pretty all the time, of course. Not to mention you’re one of the best agents in London. It’s only the idiots over at Fittes who can claim not to respect you,” he adds. “I wanted to kiss you because I like you, Lucy. May I do it again?”

Lucy swallows. “Yes, you may,” she tells him.

He does, this time pausing to push her hair out if the way of her cheek, then her mouth.

*#*#*

Lucy, as a general rule, is more of a nuisance than a help in the kitchen. Her mother never taught her to cook and her father’s culinary gifts began and ended with pouring bottles of whiskey and her older sisters were generally too busy working or taking care of her to introduce her to home economics.

However, while her psychic Sight is lacking, she does have an unusual talent for spotting a perfectly-baked peanut butter cookie, so she and George bake several batches for the cookie jar that new clients are always offered. George makes the dough from his grandmother’s special recipe and Lucy helps place them on the sheet and then stands watch at the oven door.

She’s scraping the second-to-last batch off the sheet and sprinkling them with sugar when Lockwood appears behind her, carrying a fresh parcel from the Sunrise Corporation. “Ooh, cookie,” he says, and reaches over her shoulder for one. Lucy slaps his hand away.

“Not for you,” she reprimands him. “Paws off.”

Lucy can sense Lockwood’s pout even from behind her. “Oh, come on, I know you and George’ve eaten some already, it’s only fair.”

“Too bad,” George says, dropping a new set of dough balls onto the cookie sheet.

“You still can’t have any,” Lucy declares, swiping the tray of fresh cookies out from under Lockwood’s hand and dumping them into the jar.

“I sign your paychecks!” Lockwood protests. “The least you two could do is give me a cookie.”

George says, “What paychecks?” at the same time that Lucy says, “We all share a joint bank account, Lockwood, nice try.”

“My house,” Lockwood says in a last-ditch effort. “My company. Arguably, my cookies.”

“Make us some tea and we’ll see,” Lucy tells him, sweeping across the tiny kitchen to put the last batch in the oven.

Lockwood pouts again, looking more like a grouchy toddler than the head of one of London’s most successful psychic investigation agencies. Then he breaks out his a winning smile, the one that generally graces the newspapers under headlines that read something like _Head of one of London’s most successful psychic investigation agencies,_ but less wordy. He slides behind Lucy again, this time wrapping his arms snugly around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder to say “Please?” in her ear. Really, it’s more of a murmur, the kind of buttery voice he saves for young DEPRAC secretaries. Then he presses a kiss just behind her ear.

“You two are making me nauseous,” George complains. “I might genuinely vomit if you keep this up in my presence. That would be a waste of several perfectly good cookies. Have you no _shame?”_

“No,” Lockwood says, still directly into Lucy’s ear, and a warm feeling is starting to spread through her stomach. “I also have no cookies.” He laces the fingers of his hand through one of hers, presses another kiss to her cheek.

“For god’s sake, you can have a damn cookie,” Lucy finally relents, ignoring the flush spreading up her neck and across her cheekbones.

Lockwood raises their joined hands to spin her under his arm so that she ends up facing him. Lucy grabs a cookie from the overstuffed jar on the counter next to her; Lockwood takes it and leans down to kiss her, at which point George mutters “Disgusting” and leaves the room, taking the jar with him, presumably to protect it from further raids. Lockwood’s kiss is gentle, and Lucy has to stand on her toes to meet it; Lockwood rests his free hand on her back to steady her.

It’s also a short kiss, and when Lockwood straightens up he bites into his cookie and smirks at her with a mouthful of crumbs.

“Disgusting,” Lucy says, and follows George out.

*#*#*

Slowly, kissing Lockwood is becoming less startling and more enjoyable, which is why Lucy does it more often. They kiss in the kitchen at breakfast (only a few times, as Lucy is rather averse to Lockwood’s coffee-breath-disguising-morning breath), or in the office, or in the back garden one sunny day when Lucy finally beats him fair and square in a rapier duel. They don’t kiss while on cases, because Lucy has her priorities straight and Lockwood focuses so intensely on seeing Visitors that he’d trip over his own feet if Lucy didn’t stop him. Sometimes, though, a good payout leads to celebratory donuts that lead into celebratory kisses that George coughs loudly over. George doesn’t mind, not really. He’s told Lucy as much, in his George-ish way: “As long as you two don’t get so starry-eyed about each other that you end up acting like even bigger idiots while you’re out on a job, I don’t care if you play tonsil hockey in your free time. Just leave me out of it.”

Most often, she and Lockwood find themselves in the library together; Lucy found the crackling fire and plump sofas more comfortable than any other part of the house, and Lockwood enjoyed being close enough to the front door that he could intercept walk-in clients with a professional smile. George didn’t often linger there, as he preferred to take his books to other parts of the house, where they’d be on hand as he conducted his experiments. Lucy swore up and down that after she tripped over one of George’s books on the stairs and broke her neck, she’d come back and howl to keep him up nights as punishment.

Lucy likes searching through history books for accounts of Marissa Fittes and her Type Three conversations, but at the moment her copy of _Founder of Psychic Sciences: A Biography of Marissa Fittes_ is on the floor, as her hands are grasping Lockwood’s shoulders. Lockwood has one hand on her back, cradling her ribcage, and the other is holding loose strands of hair behind her ear so that she can kiss him unobstructed. She started out sitting up like the proper young lady she never was in the middle of the couch with her book in her lap, but now she’s draped across Lockwood’s torso with her feet up behind her, nested comfortably between his leg and the back of the sofa while he leans against the cushioned arm of the couch.

Lucy leans down to experiment with laying kisses along Lockwood’s jaw, a very satisfying endeavor in her opinion. But Lockwood’s hand that’s holding her hair slides up to her forehead and gently pushes her away.

Lucy sits up. She can feel her eyebrows pulling together, which Lockwood doesn’t even seem to notice as he reaches for the book he was reading earlier _(The Three Musketeers_ in its original French) and flips to his bookmark.

Lucy sits there for a moment, dumbfounded, before she stammers, “What—what was _that_ for?”

Lockwood glances up, placing his finger in the pages to keep his place. “What was what for?”

“That!” she snaps, gesturing at—well, pretty much everything above Lockwood’s waist, which admittedly isn’t helpful. “That, that _thing_ you just did. One moment we were snogging, and then you just—“ She huffs. “Is it something I did, or are you just being an ass for the sake of it?”

Lockwood looks confused, and possibly a little dismayed. “Lucy, it’s nothing you’ve done, don’t worry,” he assures her, reaching up to brush her hair out of her face again.

“Then could you possibly be bothered to _communicate_ the next time you go and shove me off?” she says. “Instead of taking me by surprise? It’s like you weren’t even _enjoying_ it.”

And then—to the accompaniment of Lucy’s stomach plummeting—Lockwood shrugs and says, “Well, I _wasn’t,_ particularly. That’s why I stopped.”

Lucy’s honestly not sure what her facial expression looks like at that point, but she can feel her muscles crumple for a moment. She’s not sure what she feels—offended, maybe, but that doesn’t seem quite right. Embarrassed, certainly. Whatever might be the most appropriate label for the realization that she’s been forcing herself on someone who doesn’t want her. Something curls low in her throat, something that she doesn’t dare name but that usually precedes tears.

Lockwood sits up, reaching to cup her face in his hand. “Lucy?” He runs a thumb over her cheek, then blinks and says, “Oh, _hell._ Lucy, I didn’t mean it like that, I put my foot in my mouth. It’s nothing against you, it’s entirely me.”

She chokes out an incredulous laugh at that, but Lockwood says, “Lucy, I’m asexual. Sometimes I simply don’t want to kiss anyone. Haven’t I told you this already?”

Her laugh dies in her throat. Really, it’s more of a choke. “Come again?” she says.

“Hmm, I suppose I didn’t tell you,” Lockwood says, still infuriatingly calm. “I can never remember who knows. Sometimes I don’t want to kiss people. I never want anything more intimate than that. If I push you away it’s for my comfort, not because I don’t like you.” He reaches out to wrap his arms around her shoulders. “Come here,” he says, and pulls her down on top of him. He settles down against the arm of the couch again, and guides her head to rest on his shoulder. “Is this okay?” he asks.

“I don’t know why we waste rapiers on you,” she mumbles into his ear as her chest lightens. “We should just coat your kneecaps in silver, they’re pointy enough. I’m going to get bruises.”

“Don’t be unkind,” he says, and then she feels him prop his book on her lower back to read.

Lucy must doze off, because she wakes up when George starts banging around in the kitchen, producing the smell of cooking chicken. Lockwood is asleep, his head lolling back over the arm of the sofa and his arm dangling towards the floor, _The Three Musketeers_ lying open on the rug. Her hand is numb from Lockwood’s head laying on it and she can feel bruises from where his buttons dug into her ribs and she is wildly happy for a long moment.

Lockwood groans and raises his head, with a hand to his neck and a muttered “Damn.” Then he blinks at her and smiles sweetly. “Sleep well?”

“You’re a horrible pillow,” she tells him, and brushes his hair out of his eyes with one finger.

“Undoubtedly,” he says, sounding cheerful. Then he pecks her on the cheek and shoves her shoulder lightly. “Come on, let’s get up. I smell food.”

“Supper won’t be ready yet,” she says as she ungracefully rolls to her feet.

“No, but you were also laying on my bladder,” Lockwood tells her. He stretches and rises off the couch in one smooth series of motions. He pulls her close enough to kiss her forehead before he leaves the room, presumably to do something about his bladder, which frankly was more information than Lucy cared for.

She sets their books on the end table so they won’t get trampled and wanders down the hall to the kitchen. George is hovering over a pan on their miniscule stove, wearing a disgruntled expression and a frilly apron that says _~~Kiss~~ Pay the Cook._

“I hope you had a nice nap,” George grumbles. “Meanwhile, I was busy taking phone calls and making sure you’d both actually have something to eat before you go out into the field tonight. You’re welcome and I accept thanks in the form of donuts.”

“It was lovely, thank you for asking,” she says, and picks the pepper shaker up from the counter by his elbow before he knocks it off and makes a mess. Or maybe it’s the small canister of iron filings. You’ve all three mistaken them before.

Lockwood reappears, running his hand through his hair again. “This smells excellent,” he tells George, “thank you. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Stay far away from this stove,” George says. “You burn everything you touch. Fill the kettle if you want to be useful, I haven’t started the tea yet.”

“I only burned the garlic bread once,” Lockwood protests as he rummages in a cabinet for the kettle.

“Yes, and I was breaking off chunks of it to use for my charcoal sketches,” Lucy says. She picks up the kettle from where it’s been sitting in the sink the entire time and hands it to Lockwood. “Your cooking is horrific.”

“I should put something in the company policy about not ganging up to make fun of your boss,” Lockwood muses.

“You won’t,” George says.

Lockwood laughs. “No, I won’t. Lucy, do you see the mugs anywhere?”

The mugs are stacked on the counter directly behind him, and he knows it. Lucy lets out a put-upon sigh as she crosses the small kitchen and leans into him to reach out for the mugs, at which point Lockwood wraps his arms around her waist and rests his chin on top of her head. He hums happily and George makes theatrical gagging noises while he plates the chicken and Lucy pinches Lockwood’s side in retaliation.

Tonight she and Lockwood will investigate a haunted attic across town and hopefully not burn any buildings down this time and maybe, if they get bored waiting for Visitors, Lockwood will hold her hand. When they get home George will be asleep at the kitchen table even though he always insists he’s not waiting up for them. Lucy might even stop at the corner store to buy doughnuts for breakfast.

It’ll be okay.


End file.
